On a recent Tuesday night in SoHo, a group of eight women and two men donned white cotton gloves and gathered around a conference table on the lower level of the RealReal’s Wooster Street store. A line of Hermès Birkin handbags, in colors ranging from tasteful beige to gauche lime, sat under a glowing screen that read “How to Authenticate a Birkin.” A store associate offered glasses of champagne and cake, then decided that it was best if the attendees sipped their drinks at a safe distance from the bags. When everyone had returned to their seats, Claire DeBoer, a handbag-valuation manager, passed a Birkin to each person at the table. “Oh, my God,” one attendee said. “This is the first time I’ve held something this small worth ten thousand dollars!” Others took selfies with the bags.
As the name suggests, authenticity might be one of the most important things for sale at the RealReal, an online luxury-consignment store that opened its SoHo location, the first in New York, last November. At the table, DeBoer led the group through a checklist: Did the stitching on the bag look even, but not so even as to suggest that the bag wasn’t handmade? Did the leather smell like leather? (“If it smells like nail-polish remover or paint, that’s no good,” DeBoer advised.) Did the front key feature turn smoothly, like the ignition of a luxury car? One attendee, who, I later learned, was a stylist, opened his light blue bag and used a dental mirror to examine the back of the zipper. By the end of the workshop, the group determined that two of the bags on the table were knockoffs. “Some weeks it rains fakes,” DeBoer said. “It could be something their mom or ex-boyfriend gave them.” “Time to get a new boyfriend,” an attendee across the table said.
The RealReal was founded, in 2011, by the entrepreneur Julie Wainwright, who was previously the C.E.O. of the video retailer Reel.com and the pet-supply company Pets.com. Her latest venture employs a team of gemologists, horologists, art curators, and brand authenticators, who can guarantee a shopper that the Hermès or Chanel handbag—or the Céline blouse, or the Fernand Léger lithograph, or the Rolex Oyster Perpetual—in her shopping cart is real. These specialists, dubbed “the RealReal Experts,” lend an aura of cognoscente seriousness to shopping, helping secondhand-luxury buyers feel as though they belong in the élite world of designer fashion. It’s the kind of experience that Wainwright recognized a retailer like Amazon couldn’t provide. “It’s really hard for them to do luxury,” Wainwright told me. “It’s really hard for them to do anything beyond mass service.”
The idea for a luxury-consignment Web site came during a shopping trip in Atherton, a wealthy Silicon Valley town, in 2010. Wainwright and a friend stopped in a boutique with a small selection of designer consignment items, and her friend bought several pieces. Wainwright recalls, “We walked out and I said, ‘Wow, what just happened? You just bought consignment.’ ” “Oh, come on, Julie,” Wainwright remembers her friend responding. “I bought Chanel, and Prada, and Louis Vuitton, and Gucci, at a really good price . . . . I don’t care.’ ” That night, Wainwright went home and began researching the secondhand-luxury market. She cleaned out her closet and tried selling her designer items on eBay (“a nightmare”), at a local consignment store (“fun, but I had to chase my check”), and at a pawnbroker (“disgusting”), and realized that she had landed on something huge. A few months later she had chosen the name and registered the business; by the end of June, 2011, she had rented a fifteen-hundred-square-foot warehouse and set up an office. Seven years later, the RealReal has about fifteen hundred employees, offices in San Francisco and New York, and, as of last year, had raised a hundred and seventy-three million dollars in venture capital. In January, the company announced plans to fund an endowed chair in gemology at the University of Arizona’s College of Science.
Since its founding, the RealReal’s Web site has attracted eight million members. Wainwright told me that half of the site’s sellers have never consigned, and half of all purchases are made by those who have never bought secondhand clothing. Scanning the Web site, one can see why a consignment neophyte might take the plunge. Many pieces are from recent seasons—a Gucci logo hoodie, a pair of Chanel mesh ankle boots—and, unlike competitor sites, such as Vestiaire Collective and Poshmark, the RealReal’s hundreds of thousands of tops, bags, necklaces, watches, and works of art are photographed professionally. And they are, of course, guaranteed to be authentic. (At least most of the time: in January, the popular fashion Instagram @Diet_Prada called out the store for posting a Prada dress that turned out to be a dupe. The dress was pulled from the site.) Pages load with a waterfall effect, making it easy to pass hours scrolling through the site.
The SoHo store has a similar allure, with Chanel sunglasses arranged on coffee tables and Birkin bags displayed, shrine-like, on a wall. But the company also attempts to make high fashion accessible: its free workshops, like the one on authenticating handbags, give insider information to the uninitiated. This schooling even follows you into the bathroom, where one hears a recording called “The RealReal’s Guide to Designer Pronunciation.” A woman’s voice floats over the speakers: “Givenchy—use your best French accent—Givenchy, not give-en-chee.” Further along in the alphabet: “Yohji Yamamoto—Yohji, as in ‘gee whiz.’ ”
The instruction continues on the display floor, where sparsely filled racks sit beneath placards reminiscent of the gallery cards in museums. “I was raised by artists, so I’ve always viewed the designer work as high art, even though it’s wearable art,” Wainwright told me. She described feeling sad when seeing a designer piece in a Salvation Army or a Goodwill, where the display wasn’t “true to the integrity of the item.” At the SoHo store, “The Art of Travel” tops a selection of embroidered Isabel Marant blouses; in the recently opened men’s section, one finds “Streetwear Influences: Margiela to Demna.” (Though men account for only fifteen per cent of online sales, they make between a quarter and a third of all in-store purchases.) Upstairs, a placard reading “History of an It Bag: The Chanel Boy Bag” sits in front of a Chanel flap-front bag. The accompanying text describes how Karl Lagerfeld created the bag to symbolize “non-conformist femininity,” naming it after Coco Chanel’s lover Boy Capel.
The RealReal presents a different experience than thumbing through scarves at the dowager consignment shops of the Upper East Side, or the shoulder-to-shoulder mining of racks at Beacon’s Closet downtown. Some might find that its curated approach removes a certain satisfaction—that serendipitous moment, when consignment-hunting, in which one finds the latest trappings of personal style. There is, instead, an invitation to learn about craft, and an effort to soften the aura of élite fashion. At times, that mission can undermine itself. At the Birkin-authentication class, the longer I studied the materials, the less sure I was of their value. I spent the session convinced that my bag was fake, only to learn that it was real.
A previous version of this post misspelled the name of the designer Yohji Yamamoto.
